meta: February 2008 Archives

The design doesn't exactly float my boat, but I think that I've reached the point where I don't need to rebuild, at least for a while. It's going to take me a little while to learn the new MT syntax and page styles--it took me way too long to figure out how to swap the positions of recent entries and recent comments on the sidebar, but I did eventually figure it out. MT4 is much widgetastic than MT3: a lot of the templates are basically paragraphs of includes, and little else, which necessitates drilling sometimes 3 or 4 layers deep to find the places I've needed to edit.

First blush, though, is that this is a much sharper version than any that I saw with MT3, so I'm looking forward to messing about with it. That may change once I dip into the style sheets, but we'll see. I can already see, though, how some of the workarounds we developed for CCC Online are going to be supported as features in MT4, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Oh, and commenting. I've enabled anonymous comments, along with a default captcha, so commenting will require clicking on the "comment anonymously" link, and puzzling out a handful of letters. It's a little extra burden, but the tradeoff it represents (no more greenlists, no more junk drawer purges, no more picking through 100s of pending comments to find the few that are legit) should be substantial.

And the auto tag cloud, I'm hoping, will inspire me to be better about tagging my entries as I write them, and to slowly work back through the opening 1000 entries, tagging on the way...

That is all.

If my MT interface is to be believed, this would be my 1000th blog entry. I am only a little stunned by this fact, although it makes sense, considering that I've been at this for almost four and a half years now. This is the final roman numeral milestone, and so I offer three forms of celebration, in likely order of their achievement:

First, I present to you similarly roman numeralled entries, bolded for your clicking convenience: D C L X V I

I'm warning you now: it's a motley bunch of posts.

Celebration #2 is that I'm going to finally upgrade here to MT4, and I'm hoping that a new suite of antisp4m will cut down on the crap round these parts. I had to clear out close to 600 junk comments this weekend, and it's catching legitimate comments from new folk way too often. Maybe I'll slap a captcha on there too. Anyway, that's coming soon.

And coming a little later is a redesign. I need to redesign the CCCOA too, and that has priority, so it may not be until later in the semester. But look for that...

Wow. 1000 entries. Mmmmmm good. That's all.

I started the week with an idea for an entry, but not really the time to deploy it.

And as the week has progressed, ideas have come at me from all directions, but I've held back, waiting for the time to draft my early-week idea.

But now, I think I've mostly forgotten the original idea. Maybe I'll have a little time tonight to reconstruct it. Here's a tease: it's tangentially about the possibility of Welsh rhetoric.

More anon.